Whilst eating lunch today, I listened to a BBC Radio 4 programme, Off the Page: Living Cheap, which asked whether, in these straitened times, Britons could rediscover the knack of getting by on very little. Amongst its contributors were a 69-year old actor living in an alms-house and a young female blogger who had recently graduated from university, but, she claimed, couldn’t find a job.
The elderly actor was charming, civilised, reasonable and interesting.
The presenter, quoting from Laurie Penny’s blog (Penny Red), described her as “a socialist, feminist, deviant, reprobate, queer journalist”. I switched off at that point, fearing that some tedious lecture from a junior Trot might interfere with the digestive process.
Afterwards, feeling guilty for having assumed that her views would be as boringly predictable as her self-description might suggest, I visited her blog.
Turns out she used to work for the Morning Star. She believes the Tories have “just imposed a Final Solution on the urban poor” (I must have missed that particular announcement). This, apparently, is part of the “ruthless, neoliberal revenge agenda being enacted on the lives and bodies (!) of the vulnerable and the socially invisible”. (Well, not that invisible, actually.) The welfare system is about to be “snatched away almost entirely”. Nevertheless, she feel lucky – “I feel my privilege sitting on my chest like a Fuseli painting” (did he paint on concrete?). But, she tells us, the burden of privilege is “a fucking poor excuse for lying down and exempting oneself from the struggle” – the struggle to shift that abnormally heavy painting, one presumes. She will, she promises, “keep on trying to anatomise the reasons behind this assault on human decency” (by which I presume she means the slight decrease in the rate of growth of public sector funding – as far as I can see, only self-reliant, tax-paying middle-income, middle-class people and their offspring will actually suffer any “cuts”).
The labels with which she tags this particular posting are instructive : “give us a break you bunch of fucks”, “housing”, “mental health”, “public service announcements”. “torygeddon”.
On the strength of her sparkling contribution to political debate she is now a blogger and columnist for – yes, you guessed it! – the New Statesman, and her writings appear, inevitably, on the Guardian website.
Life is full of surprises!
Can a job as the BBC Social Affairs Editor be far behind?
I first encountered representatives of the Far Left at University in the early 1970s. God, they were awful! They claimed to be compassionate, caring people, but, with a few notable exceptions, they were just sad inadequates whose feelings of personal worthlessness made them incapable of accepting the “privilege” thrust upon them. Consequently – then, as now - they cynically used society’s supposed “victims” (or, even worse, pretended to be victims themselves) to punish the vast majority of us who weren’t prevented by self-hatred from feeling grateful for the opportunity to attend a great university. And, as I’ve pointed out before, they seemed to despise the large mass of ordinary working and middle-class people struggling to get by without any help from the state.
From what I observed, the emotionally stunted ranters and haters of the Extreme Left used their pet victim groups as blunt objects with which to bludgeon those contemporaries who displayed any sort of capacity for love – of friends, art, nature, their country, history and tradition.
Many young people express nonsensical, vicious, intemperate opinions – I expressed quite a few myself in my younger days: it’s part of the growing-up process. But I’m pretty sure it wasn’t until the mid-1960s that our mainstream media began to provide a regular, approbatory platform for such pronouncements. The blogosphere is open to anyone, and I would want that to change. But when it comes to newspapers, periodicals, radio and TV, can’t the supposed grown ups running them show some sense of editorial responsibility by telling the young to go away and think about things for a bit before foisting their idiotic opinions on the rest us?
If they say the same things as adults, we’ll at least know they’re genuinely horrible rather than just going through a phase.
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